The Alliance of American Football and me: An unexpected love story

On the football reactionary scale I fall somewhere between "O.J. Simpson was innocent," which I am only 80 percent convinced of, and "It's a disgrace that the NFL doesn't sell Jack Tatum jerseys from its official store." I hate replay. I am glad that the pros seem to be downplaying the dumb targeting rule. I thought the hit everyone whined about in the NFC championship game was awesome. I don't think the science behind CTE is close to settled. Nerd contrarian cases for eliminating basic elements of the game like kickoffs make me want to commit minor crimes against property.

All of which is to say that I don't think of myself as the target audience for the Alliance of American Football, the woke-ish minor league that debuted a few weeks to an audience of about 20,000 people at the stadium where a non-Power Five college team plays its home games. But I have to confess something: After watching about five games on the official streaming platform and some highlights on YouTube, I have fallen in love with it.

If you haven't been keeping up because, like normal people, you believe that football season ends with the Super Bowl — or at the very least, on college football's national signing day — the AAF is basically AAA pro football. The rules have been modified slightly in keeping with the wishes of woke sportswriters everywhere and roughly 0 percent of the fan base. There are no kickoffs or extra point attempts. There are also some restrictions on blitzing.

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At present there are eight teams, most of them in medium-sized Southern cities, all of them centrally owned by the league itself. Some of them have cool-sounding names, like the Orlando Apollos. Others, like the Memphis Express, make me think of NHL expansion franchises that never got off the ground. The teams have a territorial draft system that should, in theory, keep beloved college and NFL players close to fan bases that are already familiar with them. (The geographical distribution of teams makes this mostly aspirational at present: It will take more than the prospect of watching some former members of the Lions practice squad to convince people in Detroit to root for the Salt Lake Stallions.)

The feel of the AAF is hard to describe. It's certainly nothing like the NFL, but it doesn't really feel like college football either. There are no boutique offenses, trick plays, or freakishly undersized but talented athletes. Everyone out there, with the exception of some of the quarterbacks, looks like they should be playing playing pro football for a living. The lack of kicking is off-putting, in the way that watching a movie taped from TV used to be if your mom was late to hit the record button again after the commercials.

One of the best things about it is the chance to watch guys you loved in college but never got to see in the NFL play again. Some of my fondest football memories are of De'Veon Smith, a workhorse of a running back who flourished in Jim Harbaugh's run-first Michigan offense without having the speed or size to make a huge impression on NFL scouts. Smith is still one of the best 100 or so people in the entire world at playing tailback, though. Watching him score the first running touchdown in the history of the AAF was a treat:

Some of us already watch football from the end of August through the college bowl season all the way to the Super Bowl in January, which is to say, for just under half the year. Is adding 10 more weeks to the total kind of decadent? Probably. Do I feel like scolding myself for yielding to my man-childish obsession with watching adults play a boys' game? Not really.

The Alliance of American Football is great for the not-so-complicated reason that, dorky rule changes or not, it means more football. I can't think of a better argument than that.